DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Ed's 50p tax pledge is driven by dogma

Ed Balls's plan to increase the top rate of tax to 50p would do little or nothing to help pay off the deficit

To defuse Labour’s bitter infighting over Ed Balls’s plan to increase the top rate of tax to 50p, shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna claims this will only be temporary, to bring down the deficit. It is not ‘some ideological expedition’.

The facts tell a different story.

What is abundantly clear is that raising the top rate would do little or nothing to help pay off the deficit.

Don’t take the Mail’s word for it. Listen to the succession of former Labour ministers and party donors – not to mention the entire business community – united in their fury over a policy they say will create economic havoc.

Indeed, there is plentiful evidence to suggest the Treasury would lose money by increasing the top rate – both in the short term, by making tax avoidance schemes more attractive to the rich, and in the long term by driving business and jobs away from Britain.

Look at the figures. Since George Osborne cut the top rate to 45p, the amount raised from the band has increased by £8billion a year.

Meanwhile, the contributions made by the richest 1 per cent have risen from 27 per cent to 30 per cent of all income tax collected.

To rub the point home, the Institute for Fiscal Studies finds that at best, restoring the 50p band would have only a ‘marginal’ effect, while tellingly rejecting Mr Balls’s claim that it raised £10billion more than expected before it was axed.

But if Mr Umunna still believes the new policy is temporary and aimed purely at deficit-reduction, how does he explain the following statement, made three years ago by an ambitious young candidate for the Labour leadership?

Another vote-rigging scandal, another secret inquiry. Only this time it’s not Labour, as at Falkirk, but the Tories of Thirsk and Malton who stand accused of using underhand methods to deselect their local MP.

True, Anne McIntosh’s shoddy treatment appears at first sight to involve nothing more sinister than a personality clash with her constituency chairman, a 78-year-old retired army Major.

Unlike Unite’s conduct in Falkirk, there is no suggestion of an extremist faction using its financial muscle to try to dominate the party at Westminster.

But isn’t it disturbing that, like Labour, the Tories’ first instinct was to keep their inquiry’s report strictly confidential?

How can voters trust the political process, when our biggest parties seem allergic to openness?

Dishonest accounts

Customers without cars charged for breakdown cover… pensioners sold travel insurance, but too old to claim… borrowers misled into believing they can’t get a loan without signing up to a fee-paying deal…

As complaints flood in to the Ombudsman about rip-off packaged accounts, costing up to £300 a year, the Mail has one question for the banks.

After paying £13.3billion in compensation for misselling payment protection insurance, have they learned nothing about treating customers honestly?